THIS IS NOT YOUR MOTHER’S RANCH DRESSING

My family would go at least once a month. We’d go to the one down on Topsail Rd. I remember the warm-lit booths. The salad bar. The arcade games. I remember going often with just my momma because Daddy was out to sea. Often my mother would take a group of my little friends. And sometimes it was just our family, when Daddy was home. I loved Pizza Hut. And I believed that my body was a garbage disposal, that it could deal with anything I consumed! Including many slices of a supreme pizza and a bacon bits smothered salad drenched in ranch dressing.
I would expect that in the 1980’s, when we got that ranch dressing at Pizza Hut, that it might have had some preservatives in it; but it was probably mostly real ranch dressing. Like the kind you’d find over in Santa Barbara. It probably had buttermilk or sour cream, mayonnaise, minced green onion, garlic powder, and other seasonings. Any maybe something to keep it from going bad. It’d probably come in a big tup straight from California too!

A few weeks ago, we enjoyed time with friends at a Pizza Hut in the Mid-City area of Los Angeles. It was mildly disappointing. There was no table service. No salad bar (and in fact no salads on the menu at all!). And no ranch dressing. Well, not *real* Ranch Dressing. One of the guests ordered hot wings and this is what came with them:

Here’s the ingredient list:

Soybean Oil

Water

Buttermilk

Distilled Vinegar

High Fructose Corn Syrup

Salt

Egg Yolk

Whey Protein Concentrate

Garlic Juice

Monosodium Glutamate

Sugar

Natural Flavors

Xanthan Gum

Dehydrated Onion

Polysorbate 60

Spices

Sodium Benzoate

Lactic Acid

Calcium Disodium

Contains: Milk, Eggs

I see the buttermilk (fourth on the list?) and garlic and spices. But what the halibut is all the rest of that stuff? Soybean oil? HFCS? Polysorbate 60? This is not the ranch dressing of my youth!

Now, truth be told, I haven’t had real ranch dressing in years. Or fake ranch dressing for that matter. I’ve been too afraid of a high fat diet. But what I have been consuming, to the best of my ability, is real food. Real buttermilk (no seriously!) and real sour cream (crème fraîche).

But sometimes, I long for the naivety of my youth. To eat whatever I like, as much as I like and not worry about how it’s poisoning me. But that is the way of this modern life. Just as Pizza Hut must change how it serves its clientele in order to survive this economy (no more table service or salads), so too must I change to serve my body in order to survive. No fake foodstuffs. No sugar, HFCS, polysorbate laden white-flour-based plates of poison (did I just describe a pizza?). Instead I will feed my body that which it needs and not that which it must “deal with.”